The Program

by Stephen White

  Before long, our local congresswoman invited me to testify before a congressional committee investigating WITSEC abuses. After that splash, I did interviews with a dozen newspapers and magazines. I did CNN and CNBC and some late-night program on Fox that I wished I hadn’t done. A producer from the Today show bugged me to talk live with Matt Lauer. I did. I was hoping for a trip to New York, but all I got was a remote hookup from the local affiliate.

  The public arguments always had the same general tone. Usually a media representative from WITSEC was invited to participate. He—it was always a man—argued conviction rates based on protected witness testimony and the Marshals Service’s exemplary record of protecting the safety of witnesses and the great inroads that had been made in prosecuting organized crime and drug cartels. I responded by arguing public safety, and I underlined the cost to the general public of having convicted violent felons released into our communities.

  The truth was that, after a few weeks, the public grew tired of the argument. A few weeks after that, so did the media.

  It seemed my fifteen minutes were up.

  Then along came Ernesto Castro.

  That one day in court he pointed his fat finger at me and he said, “Remember this. For every precious thing I lose, you will lose two.”

  With those words, I was granted fifteen fresh minutes and a half pod of fresh whales.

  DURING MY THIRD visit with my new doctor he asked me the obvious question: Given the bad blood, given all I knew about the worst aspects of the program, how did I make the decision to agree to enroll in the Witness Security Program?

  “They’re good at what they do,” I said. “Protecting witnesses. There’s nobody better. After what happened in Slaughter with Landon—Matilda—whatever, I knew I needed the best protection available for her. Ernesto Castro’s people had found me in Louisiana. I don’t know how. I don’t know why. But I knew that they’d found me. I also knew that I needed better security than what I was getting in Louisiana. I felt WITSEC was my only real option, so I asked some friends to approach the U.S. attorney for me. See if he would sponsor me.”

  “But you don’t truly trust them?” Dr. Gregory asked.

  I hesitated before I said, “I trust them more than I trust Ernesto Castro.”

  “Which means what, Peyton?”

  I liked the way this therapist pressed me sometimes, forcing me to take the next step. Robert never pushed me when I expressed discomfort. I’d dangle a painful feeling out there and act as though it scared me half to death, and Robert would amble forward and give me a hug and kiss me on top of my head. I could always hear him inhaling as he got close, sniffing for my perfume.

  That memory—Robert smelling my scent—that’s a baby beluga. It still warms me and brings tears.

  I do believe that Robert often knew what I’d meant by my evasions. I also recognized that the problem was that I hadn’t always had to acknowledge what I’d meant by my evasions. Robert saved me from that. Robert actually liked saving me from that. He so much liked being the husband. The only real problem in our marriage was that being the wife wasn’t always that good a situation for me.

  Dr. Gregory was still waiting for me to respond to his question.

  I said, “Which means what it means.” I knew that I was testing his resolve. I was aware that I wouldn’t be disappointed if he rose from his chair and came over and hugged me and kissed me gently on top of my head. I wouldn’t have minded had he inhaled my perfume along the way.

  He didn’t blink. He didn’t get up. He said, “Yes. Go on.”

  I reached into my purse and unwrapped a lollipop. A DumDum. This one was cherry though I didn’t care much about the flavor. Mostly I just liked having them in my mouth. My lollipop consumption had doubled or tripled since that day outside Galatoire’s. I’d gone from a couple of bags a year to a couple of lollipops a day. Dr. Gregory would probably have a field day with that information. For the present, I kept it to myself.

  “Some things I don’t like to say out loud,” I said as I crumbled the small waxy square of DumDum wrapper into a tiny ball. The trash can was across the room beside his desk. I couldn’t decide what to do with the wrapper. I held it in my hand and rolled it between my fingertips.

  “The benefit of not saying those things out loud is…?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. I was worried that I was beginning to sound petulant. Landon would be on me in a second; she had radar for petulance. She had a lot of her father in her. It was one of the things that made me love her so much that I ached at the danger she was in.

  Dr. Gregory said, “Perhaps it’s so you don’t have to confront the fact that you don’t trust me, either.”

  That surprised me. “What?”

  “You said you trusted the Marshals Service more than you trusted Ernesto Castro. Perhaps you’re unwilling to explore that further—out loud, at least—because you don’t really trust me with what you might have to say.”

  He said it matter-of-factly, as though he was giving me directions to a new restaurant, or informing me of an approaching cold front.

  “You don’t think I trust you?” Deftly, I slid the lollipop across my tongue so it rested on the other side of my mouth.

  He leaned forward a few inches, shifted his weight on the chair. “I’m actually pretty certain that you don’t trust me, Peyton. I’m wondering why it’s so difficult for you to acknowledge it.”

  I felt trumped by his words. “The odds that Ernesto Castro would keep his promise, that he would hurt Landon or that he would hurt me, are very, very high. The odds that someone in WITSEC will hurt me, or her, are, I think, lower. The risk exists, but it’s muted. By agreeing to become a federally protected witness, I was playing the odds.”

  He said, “Have you suddenly decided to trust me?”

  “Isn’t that what you wanted?”

  I expected him to say “yes” or to say “no.” Instead he asked, “Is it important for you to do what I want?”

  LATER, WHEN THE session ended, I left his office without having told him about Carl Luppo or all my trips to the bank, or about Khalid Granger.

  I had to admit Dr. Gregory was right. I guess I didn’t trust him.

  I knew that I didn’t trust Ron Kriciak. No reason to. The stakes were way too high, and Ron wasn’t the kind of guy I was likely to trust easily. When I was a prosecutor, he was the kind of cop I was always reluctant to put on the stand. From the first day I was spirited away to WITSEC orientation, I had decided to take what the marshals had to offer and cover every one of my bets.

  Just in case.

  CARL LUPPO WAS waiting on the sidewalk outside Dr. Gregory’s office. He was in plain sight. He wasn’t trying to be invisible. His plump hands hung by his sides. No jacket over his arm. No Abercrombie bag hiding a Tec-DC9.

  I’m not sure why, but I wasn’t unhappy to see him. “Your turn next?” I asked him, hooking my thumb back toward Dr. Gregory’s building. I didn’t slow, though, and Carl had to hustle to keep up with me as I marched in the direction of the Pearl Street Mall. I didn’t have a particular destination in mind. Landon was at a spelling prep session. I had hours to kill.

  “Therapy? No, not today. I came to see you. See how you been doing. I’ve been feeling sorry I haven’t heard from you.”

  I felt much more brazen with Carl Luppo than I did with Dr. Gregory, though I wasn’t sure why. Certainly he was the more dangerous of the two men. I said, “Since that day we met and had coffee, I’ve been curious about something. Why are you in the program, Carl?”

  From the corner of my eye I watched him shrug his thick neck. He didn’t prevaricate.

  “I spent much of my life in La Cosa Nostra. You probably guessed that already, though, right? I’ve been told that I wear the Italian flag on my sleeve. That was actually a line from my last therapist. The one Dr. Gregory’s replacing. After I was arrested and put inside, things developed so that some of the people I used to work with broke some promises they’d mad
e to me. I moved to protect my own. That’s why I’m in the program.” His tone was matter-of-fact. No pride. No regret. It’s as though he was six feet eight inches tall and was acknowledging that he’d played a little basketball. He concluded with the simple words, “What did I do? Mostly, I was an enforcer. A gorilla. Along the way I killed some people. That’s what I did.”

  Those last words he’d spoken felt unreal, and they settled unevenly in my thoughts, like a mouthful of unpalatable food. I didn’t want to swallow them, couldn’t fathom spitting them out.

  Carl Luppo had said, “I killed some people.”

  Huh? It was as though I was listening to someone mimicking the dialogue from a movie.

  Some part of me was able to respond to him. I suppose it was the part of me that was always good at conversations with strangers. Robert said I was a star at cocktail parties. I don’t know if that’s true. I do know that I loved looking across a crowded room and seeing his eyes locked on mine.

  That’s a baby beluga.

  What I said to Carl Luppo was, “No, I hadn’t guessed that about you. You seem Italian, though. If I thought about it, I guess I might have suspected the organized crime part.”

  He noticed the omission I was making. “The other part? The killing part? I sometimes feel I should acknowledge that up front. People tend to have trouble understanding it.”

  I said, “I guess.” My friend Andrea felt the same way about letting dates know she had herpes. She always told them up front, over drinks. Not the kind of thing she wanted to blurt out once she was already naked with her legs spread.

  “What about you? Why are you in the program?” His tone was conversational. He had no intuition that he’d struck a match to a fuse that was ticking down to a keg of emotional dynamite. We were waiting for the light to change at Pearl and Ninth. I found it ironic that the hit man standing next to me was waiting patiently for the light to change. I wondered if the man who killed my Robert is someone who would have waited for the light to change.

  At some level I knew that with his question Carl was trying to distract me from what he’d just told me about the Mafia. I allowed the distraction. The light changed and once again we began to walk. I tried to adopt his matter-of-fact manner as I told him about the arrest of Ernesto Castro and the threat he’d made against me in court and about Robert’s murder outside of Galatoire’s.

  I didn’t tell Carl Luppo about the woman who had tried to kidnap my baby while she was playing soccer. The woman my daughter thought was dressed in clothes from Abercrombie.

  “What they did to your husband? We called hits like that ‘suicide moves.’ It’s real risky to clip a guy on the street like that with so many witnesses. Drug people,” Carl said, spitting to the side. The spitting was an obvious demonstration of disgust. “They have no respect. I wouldn’t ever have killed someone in front of his wife. Never. If I saw family close by, I’d bag the work and plan it again another day. But these new drug criminals, they’re like animals. Animals. No rules, no respect. Everything changed when the drugs started flowing. I remember the days before the poison was on the streets. I’m old enough.”

  I said, “But you killed people who had wives?” Somehow, the voice coming from my mouth resembled my natural tone even though the reality of what this man had done was becoming crystal clear to me.

  Carl Luppo was one of those men in chinos. He carried silenced handguns and ended other people’s lives.

  “I did,” he said. “It was my job.”

  My impulse was, of course, to run. I didn’t. I saw an opportunity to learn about men in chinos. And I needed to learn about men in chinos. I prepared myself to be slimed.

  “Your job? Like driving a bus? Or being a foreman at a factory? Killing people was your job?”

  He shrugged again. Was he embarrassed by my outburst? I don’t know, but I doubted it.

  “Let’s say it was a piece of my job. It was all part of the life I was living back then. The people who ended up getting whacked—by and large they knew the rules, they knew what they could do, they knew what they couldn’t do. There were customs that were followed. Protocols. Sometimes, for whatever reason, these people chose to cross the line. When they did, part of them knew deep down that eventually I’d be there. Me, or someone like me.”

  “Someone like you killed my husband,” I said, aware at some level that I was poking at a grizzly bear with a sharp stick.

  “No,” he replied without altering his stride or raising his voice at all. His defiance was apparent, nonetheless. Something about the way he said the word No carried all the defiance that was necessary. People like Carl Luppo didn’t have to protest loudly to have their protests register. “If they felt you had crossed the line, my people might have had you killed. But not your husband. That’s not the way we worked. And it would not have been done in front of him. Never. We respected families. It separated us from those that pushed the drugs.”

  “You … respected families? Would the widows of the men you killed and their fatherless children agree that you respected families?” I couldn’t believe what I’d just asked him. The voice in my head screamed, “Shut up, Kirsten!”

  We walked a few more steps before he responded. “Okay, okay. I deserve this,” Carl Luppo said. “Listen, I’m very sorry about your husband. And I’m sorry that you’ve been forced into the program, and I’m sorry for why you’re in the program. Me? I’ve spent a lot of years thinking about my fate, and I decided a long time ago that I have no one to blame but myself for where I am in my life. But you? No. What happened to you isn’t fair. I listen to your story and it sounds like you’re a victim, pure and simple. I can understand that.”

  “What?” I didn’t want his compassion. It cheapened my pain. It cheapened Robert’s sacrifice. “You understand that I’m a victim? What on earth are you saying to me?”

  He seemed to react physically to my outburst. “I deserve this,” he repeated. “The acid that’s coming from your mouth.” We were in front of the Daily Camera building. He checked the sidewalk in both directions before he resumed speaking to me. “I’m not saying I like it, but I won’t argue that I don’t deserve it. Listen,” he said, his voice suddenly an octave lower, “you should know something. Ron Kriciak is following you. Occasionally? Frequently? I don’t know. And I don’t know why he’s doing that. But I thought you should know that he’s been tailing you. It could be important.”

  I stared at him as though he had spoken to me in Italian and I didn’t understand the words. “You have my phone number,” he said, and he turned and jaywalked across Pearl Street.

  I stood still and watched him hop up on the curb and disappear around the corner past Tom’s Tavern.

  A couple walking by jostled me from behind; otherwise I might have remained frozen in place where I was.

  I kept thinking, Carl Luppo is a hit man.

  A hit man.

  Jesus.

  2

  The truth was that I’d literally been running for my life since Robert was killed but somehow had managed to end up in terrible shape anyway. After a night standing at the prep table at Q’s earning my nonexistent wage, my thighs felt like a couple of Virginia hams.

  I’d decided that I wanted to start walking my way back into shape, but I didn’t feel safe being out in the open by myself, and it was too pretty in Boulder to think about working out indoors.

  So that was another problem: Getting in shape. Virtually everything in my life felt like a problem.

  EACH MORNING AROUND ten o’clock I hovered near the mailbox and scoured the horizon for the approach of the postman’s Jeep. I was anxiously awaiting the arrival of my new Peyton Francis credit card and for my new Peyton Francis First National Bank of Boulder scenic Flatirons checks to arrive in the mail. My new life was difficult without them. Merchants weren’t eager to take temporary checks from a person who sometimes stumbled over her own name.

  Who was going to blame them?

  During moments when I
felt grateful about anything, I was grateful that I came into the program with enough cash assets that I could afford to guarantee my new MasterCard myself. The accountants at the program somehow managed to get all my assets moved from my old name to my new one. How did they do it? A judge helped, I’m sure. Ron Kriciak told me that few WITSEC participants come into the program with any legally obtained liquid assets. Most are forced to go through the laborious process of establishing credit from scratch, unable to guarantee their own credit.

  The marshals who oriented me to the program warned me what it was going to be like. Ron warned me what it was going to be like. They all said there would be plenty of little humiliations as the fact that I was living without a history caught up with me. The marshals would do nothing to help me create a false history. No fake credit reports. No forged letters of recommendation. Whatever lies I employed would have to be of my own invention.

  The marshals also told me there would be plenty of loneliness.

  And isolation.

  They were right about everything.

  ALMOST EVERY DAY while Landon was away I’d think about calling someone I knew from our past. Sometimes I would play out conversations in my head with one of my old friends from Florida, but usually it was with someone in Louisiana who knew Robert, too. My agony over the changes in my life was somehow less when I could imagine sharing it with someone who knew him and could appreciate the depth of my loss.

  Sometimes I held the phone to my ear and listened to the dial tone and it soothed me like a squeeze of a teddy bear.

  Ron Kriciak had given me lots to worry about when he gave me the lecture about contacting people from my past. I was surprised to learn that it wasn’t expressly forbidden. But he advised me not to do it. Period. The rule I’d learned in my WITSEC orientation was that I could never give out my number, my new name, or my location to anyone from my previous life, but I could call them from telephones that had been blocked to caller ID. During my orientation the marshals warned me that phone company blocks on caller ID were notoriously unreliable. Quite simply, the blocks didn’t always work. Sometimes blocked numbers showed up on caller-ID screens. So, caution. Always caution. The marshals also taught me to be extra cautious about using 800 numbers, because they automatically identify the phone number of the caller, even if the caller ID on the line was blocked, as mine was. That’s right, every time you use an 800 number the person on the other end knows who called.